Description
We find ourselves in a geopolitical conjuncture that, for many, has suffocated progressive and emancipatory political imaginaries and hopes for alternative futures. This panel brings together scholars of the Middle East to think through the purchase of imagining otherwise in deadening political contexts. It asks how IR, as a discipline often focused on making sense of the past and analysing the present, can benefit from and contribute to engagements with speculation, fabulation and futurity in a moment of horror and hopelessness. This panel brings together papers that engage the people of Palestine and Lebanon and those in solidarity with them in their insistence on a politics of refusal in the midst of massacres and genocide, looking in particular at the role of memory work and affective traces, as well as the virtual, cultural, and literary mediums through which Palestinians, Lebanese people, and their allies cultivate a commitment to and visions of the future-impossible even in the face of annihilation.
